Once again, the title of today's lecture is slightly misleading. It speaks of keyboard instruments but with the continued failure to give adequate coverage to the organ. The organ will be as much neglected today as it has been in previous sessions. And perhaps a more appropriate title for this afternoon's talk would have been “Bach and Keyboard Instruments and US,” or possibly “Bach and Keyboard Instruments and ME!” The reason for this is that many of the topics that I wish to lay before you this afternoon are concerned with my own experiences, and I will simply have to risk the appearance of excessive egocentricity. However, I shall very likely be posing more questions then I answer this afternoon. Much of what I have been thinking about appears to end with a question mark rather than with a period.

The reason for associating Bach and keyboard instruments with a certain amount of autobiography is the realization that forty years ago next May 15, I first played a work of Bach on harpsichord in public. Twenty-seven years later, when I recorded that work, I was still using an adaptation of the registration that I made in 1930. The ups and downs of fashions in Bach playing, of aberrations of which I partook richly, are interesting to look back on. I have seen certain fashions definitely abandoned, I have seen certain circles unpredictably close in on themselves, particularly with respect to instruments. I began with an instrument that, in the light of current aesthetics, would be considered eminently respectable, and much closer to the eighteenth century then many instruments I used in the intervening years. This curiously enough was a harpsichord which came into my hands out of those of the famous Bach transcriber, Busoni. It has just been fixed up again and shows that it can stand up rather well against the present-day aesthetic; but whereas the instrument is now very much the same as it was thirty-five years ago when I first acquired it, so many attitudes about playing it that I believed I had acquired from the stimulation of other instruments since, are entirely different. It is a very interesting checkpoint to see how much I could have done thirty-five years ago on this instrument that I did not do.